Among the companies that Nest is partnering with for this initial publicity push are IFTTT, Jawbone, LIFX, Logitech, Mercedes-Benz, Whirlpool, Chamberlain, and Google itself—the latter two companies will release Nest-compatible features this fall, while the others are all available today.

All of the companies' "Works with Nest experiences" focus on making Nest devices more useful when used together with other smart home gadgets—if the Nest Protect smoke alarm goes off, than LIFX's lights can flash red to make it more obvious to the hearing impaired. A Chamberlain garage door opener can tell the Nest thermostat to enter and leave Away mode depending on whether the owner is entering or leaving the garage. And Google Now will let users control their thermostats with their voices and set proximity-based rules that will adjust their thermostats before they get home.

"It's not just integration for integration's sake, or connectivity just to connect," Matt Rogers, Nest co-founder and engineering head, told Ars. "It's 'what are great user benefits we could do?' Those are the kinds of things we're going to highlight. That said, it's a developer program that's opened up very widely. So whoever wants to build stuff can build stuff."

Early Nest investors Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers are both partnering with Nest to fund startups that want to get their own Nest-related projects off the ground. For now, though, Nest is focused on partnerships with established companies.

Nest's tools are entirely Web-based, and there is no cost to developers who want to begin developing for Nest.

Nest, Google, and your data

While the developer program's goal of connecting Nest gadgets to other devices sounds pretty Google-y, Rogers told us that Nest had been working on the developer program "behind the scenes for about a year," well before the Google acquisition happened. Nest is taking advantage of Google I/O and of Google's sheer size to amplify the announcement and attract more interest, but at least, as of this writing, the program is being driven by Nest's team and not by its parent company.

"Before Google, we would have to build our own event, and having an event like I/O is a really big deal," Rogers said. "Tens of thousands of people come to these kinds of things, so this is a really good platform for us to work on."

Further Reading

Google's purchase of Nest has prompted many questions about privacy, so many that the company now includes notes about privacy in most of its releases. Rogers mentioned in the release about Dropcam that Nest data "won't be shared with anyone (including Google) without a customer's permission" and that "Nest has a paid-for business model, and ads are not part of our strategy." Nest developers are required to let users know what their devices and services are requesting and why, and Nest will neither send those developers personally identifiable information nor allow them "to retain more than 10 trailing days of data." These policies are subject to change, but for now Nest appears to be taking user privacy seriously.

Let's hope the company's apparent commitment to privacy continues, because Nest devices are already collecting a lot of data about users' homes. The company recently released a white paper (PDF) that presented anonymized data collected from Nest Protect devices about carbon monoxide events in homes. Though this data can't be tracked back to users, Rogers underlined the sheer scope of the information Nest's products can collect, even though they're still installed in just a fraction of homes.

"No one's had as many connected devices in our space before," he told Ars. "So in essence, we're actually doing the biggest scientific study to date. All the government studies that were done when carbon monoxide was becoming a big deal and people started paying attention to it were in a couple hundred homes. This is a couple hundred thousand homes. It's a completely different order of magnitude. It covers the whole country, all different demographics and geographies. We're learning a lot about how homes work and can actually affect the laws now."

Rogers said Nest has also been approached by home insurance companies that want to make sure their policyholders actually have functioning smoke detectors. None of these deals have closed now, but it's an indicator of how Nest information can be used by third parties when users agree to give it to them, and interest from companies is only going to increase as the products end up in more homes and serve more functions. The kind of future where Nest products and others like them have an impact on you whether you own them or not is already on its way.

Avoiding a platform war

Apple's HomeKit was unveiled at WWDC earlier this month. Rogers sees HomeKit and the Nest Developer Program as complementary.

Megan Geuss

Rogers also sees the Nest Developer Program as "complementary" to Apple's recently announced HomeKit project. While HomeKit is going to allow users to control smart home devices with their iPhones and will supposedly make it easier to connect those devices to your network and to each other, Nest's API focuses on making those devices work in tandem once connected.

"This is less about 'how do you get devices on your Wi-Fi network,'" said Rogers. "This is 'after you get them on the Internet, what do you do with them after that?'"

Nest is apparently willing to consider integrating HomeKit support into its own products in the future, and for now the company wants to continue offering the same features to both iOS and Android users.

"We're very cross-platform. In fact, most of our customers use iOS devices, so we're totally platform-agnostic," said Rogers. "We have very deep Apple DNA. My co-founder [Tony Faddell] and I both came from Apple, 70 percent of the company is from Apple, so we have a lot of that DNA and we have a lot of friends there, yet we're also part of Google. It's a really healthy place. We've kind of converged those two worlds together."

"The home shouldn't be a platform war," Rogers said. "We're going to be neutral. Switzerland."

Making smart home tech matter to regular people

There's no doubt that some of the stuff this new API delivers is convenient, the fact remains that smart home hardware is still a niche. Most apartments and homes come with smoke detectors and thermostats. Getting regular customers to go out and replace those perfectly functional devices with expensive and occasionally buggy smart devices will be difficult—Nest had shipped about 440,000 Nest Protects between October 2013 and April 2014, which is reasonably impressive but nowhere close to mass-market devices like smartphones, tablets, and PCs.

While direct-to-consumer sales account for most of Nest's installed base today, Rogers pointed to two areas of growth that will get these products out to more people. Contractors who install heating and cooling systems around the country are "selling a ton of Nests" these days, he says.

"Utility companies are giving away or giving rebates for Nests because of the energy efficiency benefits and because of the peak energy demands, the savings we can do there," Rogers told Ars. "That's been an enormous driver for us. When you have a $100 rebate, that makes it a lot easier to buy the product."

"Our goal is to make them free. Our products should be free," he continued. "If you save people energy and save lives, those are good things that everyone should have."

Andrew Cunningham
Andrew has a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College and has over five years of experience in IT. His work has appeared on Charge Shot!!! and AnandTech, and he records a weekly book podcast called Overdue. Twitter@AndrewWrites